The collected works of Darkstar

http://se.mirror.nekoware.se/ didn't work for me but http://se.mirror.nekoware.net/ did.

-Darkstar

My suggestions:

Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu
Kumo no mukou, yakusoku no basho
Azumanga Daioh
Last Exile

As someone who has learned japanese for some time now, I can say this:
- pronounciation is really simple (at least for me, with German as primary language). You just pronounce what is written. The only difficult thing is the "r" sound but you'll handle that in no time.
- Compared to other asian languages (chinese, korean) there's no tonal language and no intonation used, at least if you're not aiming to rival native speakers (slight intonational changes occur but they can generally be ignored by a beginner)
- the grammar is actually pretty easy (only 2 irregular verbs) and systematic. However, since there are for example only 2 times (past and present/future) you have to memorize a lot of simple sentence structures to express things that happen relative to each other in time. These structures easy in themselves but there's an awful lot of them
- "keigo". sooner or later you'll encounter the "honorative language". This is pure evil, i.e. more (and irregular) verb forms to learn, new grammatical structures, and so on. the good thing is that you can get around in japan quite easy without speaking it. the bad thing is that you have to recognize and understand it, so you'll have to learn it anyway
- kanji. Not so much a problem nowadays, with small pocket dictionaries that tell you the meaning of the kanji if you draw it on the display. But with all the different readings and special readings for some compounds it can get very stressful to memorize them. Try to learn about 20 kanji (with like 4-6 compound words each) every week, practising the ones that came earlier so that you don't forget them.
- particles. Most of the time these are quite logical grammatical helper words, but here, too, the exceptions can be annoying. for example you use "ni" to specify the destination of a movement verb, and "de" to specify the location of an action taking place. but for example the verb "to live in" also takes the "ni" particle even though it does specify a place and not a movement. And that's just one of the easier ones...

Apart from that I think that japanese is a very nice language to learn, and the effect of watching a japanese movie or anime and understanding whole sentences is very rewarding

ganbatte kudasai!

-Darkstar

...in or around Kyoto that sell old (vintage) computers? It'll be some time until I get to Akiba so I thought I could maybe find something here. But the shops I found only sell used consoles and games, which is great too (I'm thinking of getting a PC-FX and a NeoGeo ) but I'd rather find some Sharp/Fujitsu computer goodness...

Any ideas/hints?

-Darkstar

Well, the Neo Geo games are still pretty expensive over here (saw some for over 24000yen which is about 200euro) but they can be as cheap as 900yen (some crappy fighting game... in fact it seems that this system has *only* fighting games, at least that's all I see here...)

I wouldn't mind getting an X68000, X1, FmTowns or MSX... but so far I still haven't found any of them. Shipping them will also be a pain in the butt I guess... I heard that for example X68000 Systems use some rare video refresh rate which only very few monitors can handle, so I'd have to ship a CRT around as well *sigh*

-Darkstar

It looks less impressive than during the annual Anime Fair though

Hope it was fun. I`m currently stuck in Kyoto, examinations are due next week.

-Darkstar

Saved this baby from the dumpster. Don't know yet what I'll do with it.

My third Octane, and still no PCI cardcage




...and now that I have the root password:


-Darkstar